For the states, the academic achievement divide endures

This is exactly what my Father referred to as a "college educated idiot". These are the people that we all know so well, they are book smart and walk around quoting famous authors and know a lot about the French Renaissance...yet they cannot change a flat tire, fix a water leak in a faucet, don't know the difference between a bolt or a screw and have never done a bit of hard work in their lives.

Yes some of these people are important to society such a physicians, neuro-surgeons, scientists and the like...but some of the idiots are so full of themselves, and the only thing they seem to offer society is their opinions, through papers and commentary fluff pieces...Seriously, if it came down to a survival type situation...what type of person would you want by your side?

 

Again you make the mistake of equating a college degree with intelligence. Is it any wonder that the states that have more liberally brainwashed college educated students vote Democrat?

 

Nobody has ever really figured out why people vote a particular way but I tend to think self-interest ranks way down toward the bottom of the list of reasons. I also happen to think anti-intellectualism and resentment is at the very top of the list in rural portions of the country.

 

Because the 'Intellectual Yet Idiot' thinks they know what is best for the 'rubes'.

 

To expand:

Level of education does not always correlate with degree of intelligence.

It does however directly correlate with time spent in academic institutions and formal educational settings. More highly educated people spend more time learning to rely on other people's explanations, theories, and information about things from other people's experiences and activities. They sometimes spend 20 years in a row in a series of academic programs that organize the information, select the explanations, and suggest or require particular methods of interpretation.

Level of education does not at all imply anything about how much time anyone spends learning, or thinking about and testing the validity of what they have learned. School is not the only place people learn, and all those people who spend time learning independently of academic institutions are still having experiences and, moreover, are learning directly about the world they live in. They are still thinking about what they have learned. Significantly, they do not have professors and academic advisors guiding their thinking. The validity of their conclusions is not measured against whether they match some academic's preconceptions, but rather whether they match with immediately experienced realities and concrete requirements.

It is neither unfounded nor illogical to draw the conclusion that people with high levels of formal education are not particularly better equipped to make sound choices about the real world (than their less formally educated counterparts) for the simple reason that long exposure to the abstract and theoretical does not necessarily imply an improved understanding of the real world.

you are right, neither anti-intellectualism, nor elitist snobbery should be provoked by this stark reality.

My long experience in academic institutions all across this country (21 years as a student and 8 years as a teacher) showed me two things clearly.

1-Schools and universities tend to discourage real skepticism and independent thinking and encourage agreement with, and support of academic institutional culture and pre-established academic norms.
2-There is a tendency for academic institutions, especially in the humanities and the social "sciences", to lean politically left. This is evidenced in the rise of the leftist interpretation of the concept of political correctness, largely fueled by universities in the 80's and 90's, and then la. It is even more starkly exemplified by the current left-leaning policies of many universities.​

Considering the combination of these two factors, it is no wonder that states with more formally educated people tended to vote Democrat.

It also makes sense that people who spend years being led by their intellectual noses in formal academic settings would gravitate in larger numbers toward the candidate who was in line with her party's political establishment, and that people who did not spend as much time being led by the nose in academic institutions would gravitate in larger numbers toward the candidate who dismissed his party's political establishment.

 

Well, your neighbour is the world, so yes.

Ever read "The Screwtape Letters"? It's a remarkable book, by a remarkable author (CS Lewis), based on a relationship between a demon and his unwitting servants. It does have a religious ethic of course, given the author, but that's easily ignored in favour of the broader picture. In it, Lewis puts forward and discusses the theory of the concentric circles of charity. He suggests that this is one of the tools of the eponymous demon, but it can just as easily be attributed to general social decay, ego, laziness, or any other 'evil' you care to exchange. Anyway, the theory is that our charitable feelings increase the further out from ourselves - at the centre of the circle - they're targeted. The clear point being that when the target is remote, we can justify doing nothing but feeling and talking.

 

Progressivism is a white invention. Nuff said.

 

While I agree that many 'educated' people are literally retarded when it comes to the business of living (survival), that is only one manifestation of their potential for surprising stupidity. Take your average humanities or arts graduate. They're so thoroughly indoctrinated to think ... as though thinking itself is the end goal .... that they leave college with absurdly inflated ideas of the value of their own thoughts. People who believe this about the product of their own brains are far more likely to seek out and remain cloistered in echo chambers ... because in the real world that's the only place their inflated ideas will find validation. When that happens, thinking soon becomes quite corrupt.

But yes, it's terrifying to think of how utterly useless many non-STEM students allow themselves to become in terms of the simple business of staying alive. My own personal experience in terms of close family members, self, and friends is that those with practical degrees tend to be practical people. I would rather have engineers and doctors on hand when the apocalypse comes, than poets.

 

This actually reflects your own biases more than it speaks anything valid. I also used to imagine that anti-intellectualism and resentment were a thing. After all, it's what the interlectials and media told me. And boy, didn't it pander to my ego Played right into the vanity of moral and intellectual superiority, and the very flattering idea that we're the subject of mass envy (aka, resentment).

When I actually started taking the time to talk to the dumb-dumb racists, I realised they were laughing at us, not with us. They want nothing we have, they don't think we're superior, and they're often smart enough to have our (*)(*)(*)(*)ing number. If anyone came away from this exercise resentful, it was me. I'd been sold a lie.

 

If even charity is bestowed earnestly (I hope), then it should begin at home, there should be some amount of extra surplus when one is also keen of the welfare of his/her own side. But sometimes the uncertainties of time, considering how chaotic geopolitics and how fickle it is based upon economic and social conditions a lot will always opt to promote self preservations inventing safety nets that could be considered as never been an altruist but missed the essence that it is for survival. Sometimes our bliss is somebody else demise that's the truth about globalization and always the competition favors the already strong, but in other sense the strong is also dependent with the weak in order to sustain survivability and the improvement of such so the weak should be supported as well. So everything depends which side one is in for each side has it's own rights equality and justice will always be dictated with the needs incurred and never with plights, that's how it is.

 

Contempt of rural working people is virtually a Democratic Party platform.

"Intellectualism" has had devastating effects on this country because it evolved to a lazy-ass and self-worshiping ideology.

 

Of course, the empirical reality that ten-of-ten in the Fox Business list of "Best Educated States" cast their electoral college votes for the Democratic Party's presidential candidate while nine-of-ten in the list of Fox Business's "Worst Educated States" cast their electoral college votes for the Republican Party's presidential candidate (in both 2012 and 2016) does not tell the entire story.

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It does seem that the political divide in our country is more between urban needs and culture versus rural needs and culture than any other divide. Those needs are quite different, but not diametrically opposed. It also does seem that the Democratic party has more of its platform dedicated to urban needs and the Republican party is more attuned to rural needs. When our politicians were more likely to work in a bipartisan way, both urban and rural needs were addressed. We need to return to that way of thinking. We do not need to pit urban needs against rural needs. The federal government should address both.

 

There hasn't been a case yet where it has been shown that it is better to have none of your own teeth than to have all of your own teeth. So, yeah, we think it is better that you brush your teeth. I know you hate us for it.

 

Sure they want things we have. I always say I don't want that 8,000 sf home in the Hamptons, that I have no use for it, but, truth be told, I do. Anybody who walks around saying they are satisfied with a GED is a fool.

 

Are you implying that only people with college degrees brush their teeth?

 

I'm implying the preponderance, just like the OP.

 

Is that what you think about your party's base? The people you depend upon to give you a win? Libs certainly weren't endowed with class and gentility. That's for sure. Have you ever thought that some people would like to go to college, but can't for one reason or another? A college education doesn't make a person kind and compassionate.

 

I grew up in Mass and live in Rhode Island now and that is what exactly the residents prefer. They want government to play a role in the lives of it citizens. Citizens of some other states don't. And please tell me why only simple minds prefer it. If you think you advance a conservative agenda with such generalities you are wrong. The more densely populated the state the bigger role government plays. It is intuitive for crying out loud. you got 5000 people sharing a square mile, the more rules and regualtions need to be put in place. you got 50 people sharing a square mile there is less need for government.

 

People who can't take care of themselves prefer a large, nanny state.

 

The empirical data at the county level confirms what is obvious in the allocation of electoral votes by states - and exposes an even greater divide than in the past based upon academic achievement:

Discussing the objective data may not be "PC" for some, but it is what it is.

 

The victory of the reality tv performer turned political ingenue is a victory for blue-collar Whites as is confirmed by the allocation of electoral college votes, analysis at the county level, and individual voter surveys.

Back in July, the right-wing Washington Examiner had identified the divide in academic achievement, the most significant single metric in determining presidential preference:

 

I love debunking the garbage fallacious premise of this thread from this OP, just as in every tedious, biweekly regurgitation of the topic.

1. Trump, not Clinton, won white college degreed voters by 4% according to CNN exit polls.
2. Trump won every single higher income hexile. In fact the whole "most educated" canard is crafted to hide the fact that the low taxpaying "free stuff" crowd vote overwhelmingly Democrat.
3. Teachers and other government employees get pay bumps for obtaining "advanced degrees" in pretty much anything from anywhere, so it's no wonder the states with huge cities and the highest bureaucratic infrastructure (1 in 10 NYC residents was a gov employee last I checked) have more of these garbage degrees. GIGO. Studies from LW think tanks show these pay bumps are a waste and do not increase competence or results at all.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-masters-degree-pay-bump-for-teachers/

Since 70% of school teachers or so vote Democrat, the actual premise could more fairly be stated "higher population centers with more teachers and Complex bureaucratic infrastructure vote Democrat" something we knew already.

4. "States" are not "more educated" as a matter of fact, piling abstraction upon abstraction is daft, just another attempted con in this lie narrative. Most states contain vastly different economic and social strata in different parts, different "sides of the tracks" across county lines and even city streets, so trying to agglomerate them in this way is the height of fallacy.

5. The OECD is a leftist front, or at least statist. Everything that issues from it is ideologically suspect due to massive cherry-picking and taking out of context in pursuit of a socialist narrative. The QOL data is no different.

6. Any statistics or talking points that attempt to gauge "more educated" without differentiating where the degrees are from and what they are in is bunk. Sure, there are scads of social workers in the Bronx with "advanced degrees," are they more educated than an entrepreneur with a degree in engineering or those employed by him? Of course not. Degrees in education, social work, communications, government, women's-black resentment studies, social unsciences generally, much humanities, are far more likely signs of indoctrination than education. Factor those garbage degrees OUT and THEN let's talk.

7. Assessing "more educated" states red/blue due to what may be a couple hundred thousand votes or far less is the obvious height of folly. The "red/blue" state distinction is only useful during elections for convenience sake. Attempts by the projecting left to extend that abstraction to "rational" claims such as the topic's claim are merely thinly concealed bigotry and flamebaiting.

8. The left remains enthralled with creating bogus narratives painting their political opposition as inferior. This is a projection, it's the left that is composed of mostly inferior, incompetent people.

Utterly debunked as usual, you're welcome folks!

 

Trump won non-college whites 66%-29%, surpassing Romney’s 61%-36% margin.

Romney's winning over a demographic that had once enthusiastically supported Democrats was a warning sign that the Clinton campaign failed to heed.

If Trump can resurrect high-paying manufacturing jobs, especially in the so-called "rust belt," and restore the coal industry to its passing prominence, he will have secured this group for the GOP, even as it continues to diminishes in the proportion of the electorate it constitutes. Democrats could continue to win the popular vote (as they have done in six-out-of-seven presidential elections) but the electoral votes they barely won in a few industrial states in 2016 will become more secure for Republicans in the future.

 

Nate Silver is every bit as discredited as you are, OP, and there is no reason for anyone to take any of your or his claims about anything seriously going forward.

For example, ANY discussion of "non degree holding white voters" must include the necessary context that since our voting age is 18, that many first time voters still in HS and college voted for Trump. This was due to an obvious, concerted effort of the "cool kids" of the internet to wage a net war for Trump and against Clinton, a very well-known phenomenon, and had little or nothing to do with actual education level as you and the thoroughly discredited Silver want us to believe. Trump did a better job of speaking to young people who don't have degrees or diplomas... yet. That's the HONEST way to position analysis. Of course neither you nor Silver are going to acknowledge that because you are intent on bolstering the insecure left's need to feel superior to the "unwashed masses" (while in actuality, the -real- unwashed masses vote overwhelmingly Democrat).